The Case Of Brendan Dassey

The clip watched showed Brendan Dassey being interviewed by the police as a suspected accomplice to his uncle Steven Avery’s crime of the rape and murder of Teresa Halbach. This clip shows the police interrogating the teenager Brendan Dassey without any parent or lawyer present. This tape and his ensuing confession were the ultimate cause of his imprisonment where he was convicted of being an accomplice to murder and disposal of a body. Brendan Dassey’s conviction was ultimately overturned as the confession, which was the prosecutions’ leading evidence, was thrown out after it proved to be coerced. While the confession was coerced it is important to acknowledge that the officers were not entirely improper with how they conducted the interview.

One reason for this is that they do not understand that memory does not work as a recording device; instead as Loftus says it works like a Wikipedia page both you and others can edit your memory. The officers say multiple times to Dassey that the events in his memory are like a video he just has to run through or a picture that he can observe – they are wrong. This causes them to tell him things that he does not know and later works into his story. For example they ask him earlier if she was naked and he does not respond to it, rather he responds to a different question they ask. Then later when they ask him about if she was naked again he confirms it, despite the fact that five minutes earlier he could not answer the question, as he had no idea. The officers give him that information. In addition to feeding him information that way they also tell him exactly what they think he did and wait for him to confirm it. They tell him that he needs to be honest about how he did go inside and will only move on from that idea after he confirms it. They do this repeatedly during the interrogation. The officers give Dassey all of this information and what they expect he had done and they do so confidently. However, as Elizabeth Loftus says confidence and detail in a memory does not mean that event actually happened. The officers confidence in the memory is transferred to Dassey who now thinks how could I have not done what they said, they seem so certain. Dassey undergoes the misinformation effect; he is incorporating this misleading information into his memory, so he now truly believes he has done what they say he has. The video of the interrogation proves it to be coerced. The police plant memories and expectations on what Dassey did and his memory was fragile so it absorbed them and he confessed to a crime he did not